NEW YORK (NEWSWATCH33) – Late last night, online shoppers took advantage of what they assumed was a fire sale on BestBuy’s website. Users purchased $200 gift cards for $15 however the website immediately fixed the “glitch”, possibly dishonoring or charging the full price for the error.
For several hours late Tuesday night, customers visiting Best Buy’s website were able to purchase a two hundred dollar gift card for fifteen dollars. What appeared to be a sale for most customers, quickly unfolded to a technical problem the company quickly fixed. However, before the linked was eventually shut down, reportedly over three hundred thousand people took advantage of the apparent bargain.
BREAKING NEWS: El Chapo Offers $10 Million To Any U.S. Citizen Who Provides Shelter For Him
Reddit users where the ones who exposed the glitch. People who purchased a gift card claimed the sale was successfully completed and their bank was charged, however Best Buy will most likely cancel the order, referring to a “site glitch”.
�I am an employee of Best Buy, and we are very good at honoring our mistakes, however, mistakes this public with 1000s of people ordering something super discounted by mistake will most likely get canceled,� one Redditor wrote. �In the mean time, I went ahead and ordered 2, but chances are, we�re all getting a refund.�
After the mayhem the apparent glitch caused, Best Buy website engineers took a deeper look into the situation to determine what caused the price drop. After careful analysis, reportedly the website was hacked.
“We scanned out databases and found an exploit on our server which caused the system to charge the fifteen dollar price for the two hundred dollar order. The exploit was placed on our servers approximately at 5 p.m. but was not set to activate until 11:45 p.m. We were able to check the timestamp of the files on our server and noticed a few of them were changed which prompted us to look deeper,” said Sanjay Kalmarivana, network administrator for the website.
According to reports, a message was left on Best Buy’s servers, from a Chinese hacker claiming to have caused the glitch to occur.
“???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????”
Which in english translates into:
“We have successfully altered the coding on your servers caused a price malfunction on gift card purchases. We are not happy with the fact that many of your products are made in China cheaply, yet should in America for outstanding and unfair amounts. Since the people of China are taken advantage of by being paid slave wages to build your products, we have decided to give Americans an opportunity to buy them at a Chinese discount. Stop corporate greed.”
Authorities are investigating the situation to determine where the cyber crime originated.
It is still unclear how Best Buy will respond to the reported glitch. Although the company can honor the glitch purchases, or simply refund everyone’s money, the company may be hopeful in successfully charging customers full price for the gift cards.
